There are many challenges to creating a highly secure computing environment including preventing eavesdroppers from accessing private communications, preventing vandals from tampering with information while in transit from sender to receiver, authenticating users logging into a network, verifying a network server is indeed the server it professes to be and safeguarding confidential documents from unauthorized individuals.
One of the greatest challenges, however, is preventing the authorized user from using sensitive data in an unauthorized manner. For example, with conventional security measures it is very difficult to prevent an authorized user from appropriating sensitive data by simply copying the sensitive data to a removable storage device such as floppy diskette. For these reasons, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for an improved mechanism for preventing the appropriation of sensitive data.